Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” may be a very faithful adaptation of the Lewis Carroll novels. But the book is “Through the Looking Glass,” not Through the Victorian Oil Painting. Wonderment has never been this tedious.
When Alice (Mia Wasikowska) falls down the rabbit hole, this time at the age of 19, she arrives in Underland, convinced this is a new place to her despite the numerous dreams she had of what she called Wonderland when she was a child. The stock of Carroll heroes including a smoking caterpillar, talking flowers, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, a feisty mouse, the white rabbit and of course the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) all debate whether she is the right Alice. If so, she is destined to slay a dragon-like monster called the Jabberwocky, remove the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) from power and return Underland to its once glorious state under the rule of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).
The trick with adapting this story, as it has been done so many times before, is clarifying that it is not a kid’s story. Doing so opens it up to a whole new level development flaws. Aside from not being a cartoonish experience full of joy and wonder, Alice is an uninteresting straight-man put through a series of increasingly quirky and odd encounters with one-dimensional characters.
The inhabitants of Underland are strictly evil, saintly, moronic or insane, and to an extent, Alice is given no personality at all. Frankly, these characters are boring to behold because their sole purpose is to act as an obstacle on Alice’s mind-trip, each one with a defining stereotype. While occasionally entertaining (The Cheshire Cat particularly has its mystic moments), their spontaneous flare-ups of personality are random and rather irritating. Consequently, the tone of the film flits back and forth between comic spontaneity and meticulously tense mythology.
In primarily exploiting these characters’ eccentricities, Burton’s film forces us to laboriously trudge through swamps of back story to put “Wonderland” in any sort of context, which is not a desirable trait when your plot is in actuality a sequel to a film that doesn’t exist.
This lack of context reveals the story for what it really is: a typical, episodic quest to obtain a magical McGuffin that will be used in an unimaginative battle of epic proportions. All of Burton’s oddities can’t hide the fact that this is a standard screenplay spit out by the Hollywood studio system, as evidenced by the unnecessary substitution of a gigantic battle in place of a third act. It is a boring addition to what is otherwise supposed to be a creative fantasy. And what’s more, Burton, although a talented director, has no knack for action sequences, and Alice’s climactic fight with the Jabberwocky is a poorly staged mess.
And a glimpse at the finale might indicate the nature of “Alice in Wonderland’s” use of 3-D, it being the first movie to actually be filmed in 3-D since “Avatar.” While Burton has always been a master of the visual art of cinema, his directorial style with the new technology is highly distracting. Gimmicky cannot begin to describe the Cheshire Cat head floating over the audience or the spear being shoved out of the frame.
Although if “Avatar” taught us anything about 3-D, the best looking moments are the ones that seem to reach deep into the screen to create a sense of immersion. What immersion is not is when clocks, pianos and other flying objects hurtle past during Alice’s plummet down the rabbit hole, they don’t come out of the screen but seemingly brush up against the front of the frame.
For the longest time, Tim Burton’s films have each been definitively unique in imagining a bizarre fantasy. It’s bad enough that even a tool unique enough to have some call it the future of cinema can still be entirely misused, but “Alice in Wonderland” is proof that even magic is constructed from a formula. When Burton stays too close to it, good story, complex characters and most notably fun are all at his mercy.
2 stars